To my amazement there stood a raven

[austin_dern]

It's been another full week on my humor blog. If you didn't care for it on your Friends page or your RSS feed I understand. I'm not sure how I feel about reading it there either. Kind of weird, mostly. But here's the past week's links for you anyway:

• While Waiting At Rite-Aid For Fifteen Minutes After The Flu Shot, last week's major piece, a voyage of self-inquiry that's not completely made up, technically.
• What I’ve Picked Up From The 1953 Movie _The Neanderthal Man_ a decent little movie that doesn't quite live up to its ape-man-transformation premise.
• Statistics Saturday: Actual Star Trek: The Next Generation Plots That Sound Like Parodies Of Star Trek: The Next Generation Plots and no, the one where Dr Crusher inherits her grandmom's sex ghost doesn't make the cut.
• Why I’m Not Ready To Talk About How September Treated My Blog Just Yet (I hit one of those terrible little barbs in some old-time radio)
• Statistics September, Or, Getting Around To This Finally or how my blog readership was after I ignored the clear signal about what people want to read.
• Who’s Using Twitter Ads To Play Pranks? or, I hold up a weird advertisement like that's content for me.
• How The Vice Presidential Debate Brought Me Wikipedia Joy or, I hold up a weird Wikipedia sentence like that's content for me.
• From The September 2016 Scraps File stuff I didn't use on my humor blog last month; enjoy!

With that entered let's go back to Cedar Point and late June, our trip from just before our anniversary.

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Live entertainment! That's been returning to Cedar Point in recent years and here we caught folks, I think, setting up outside what used to be the Frontier Carousel's building. On another visit I think this equivalent group did an acoustic version of Kiss's ``I Wanna Rock And Roll All Night'', as they will.

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The Maverick roller coaster replaced the White Water Landing log flume in 2005. Yet every year the logo for the old ride is still there, on the roof of the Maverick gift shop's building. It's a little more faded every year but it's there, making the Western-themed area feel a little more authentically ancient.

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The Judy K locomotive puttering along in front of the Mean Streak roller coaster. The locomotive rides all have engines that were once in actual working productive service; the Judy K's, I believe, used to run for some industrial purpose near Lansing. There are trainspotters who go to Cedar Point to follow these engines and doesn't that make your life a little more wonderful yet?

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Sunset as seen from near the Hotel Entrance. The Gemini roller coaster's the big structure in back. The dinosaur is there to entice people into the Dinosaurs Alive! upcharge attraction, fifty animatronic dinosaurs and related figures in an attraction that everybody kind of forgets is there. They add something to the view from Millennium Force, anyway.

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Seagull really confident he'd hear it if a roller coster were anywhere near.

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Another of those things you never notice and then one year you get back and they're gone: picnic pavilion near the front of Cedar Point. I have the suspicion it might have been installed or renovated in the 1960s for some reason.

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Trivia: On 7 February 1891 Herman Hollerith announced he had a deal with the Austrian government: he would build a dozen tabulating machines for the census taken December 1890 but not to be processed until October. Source: Herman Hollerith: Forgotten Giant of Information Processing, Geoffrey D Austrian.

Currently Reading: How The Post Office Created America: A History, Winifred Gallagher.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Wow, actually real, formerly working locos? Very cool! Easy to see why they'd be so popular with the 'spotters, given they're evidently very well looked after. And there is quite undeniable magic in steam trains, though I've been on very few so far - once in 1999, when one of the small now-private lines was holding one of their event days (a beer tasting, I think) down in Cornwall, and then in 2014 or so, with one of TfL's "Steam on the Underground" days, where I was not only in a steam-drawn carriage (first class!), but on the actual Underground system. =:D

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

They are real, functioning locomotives. There's a plaque somewhere in Cedar Point that describes the origins of each of the five. (I'm not sure how accurate the plaque is; if I've learned one thing, it's that amusement park signs are not good reference materials.) There is something great in these sorts of small engines, though.